The Night the Bed Fell Summary

Over the years Thurber's fiction paralleled to some degree the events in his life. Most of his contributions to the New Yorker were published in the 1930s, and most of the earlier pieces were more light-hearted and innocent than those that were written during his marital difficulties with Althea (whom he divorced in June 1935 to marry Helen Wismer a month later), during social upheavals such as World War II and the McCarthy Era (which he spoke out against on many occasions), and particularly during the bleak periods of physical illness and, in spite of numerous operations, advancing blindness which led to an emotional breakdown as well. The fiction that was produced during Thurber's black periods is terrifying, bitter, cold, and harsh. Closely aligned with the side of Thurber that delighted in cruel practical jokes and the misery of others, many pieces like "The Cane...

The Night the Bed Fell Short Guide

James Thurber Biographies (7)

James Grove Thurber (1894-1961) was an American writer and artist. One of the most popular humorists of his time, Thurber celebrated in stories and in cartoons the comic frustrations of eccentric and ...
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Biography EssayIn a general survey of American humor, James Thurber comes after the traditional horsesense humorists and before the black humorists of the postatomic era. His most famous and most endu...
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France does not figure prominently as a subject in James Thurber's works. Yet his three longest European sojourns--from November 1918 to March 1920, from May 1925 to May 1926, and from May 1937 to Aug...
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In a general survey of American humor, James Thurber comes after the traditional horse-sense humorists and before the black humorists of the postatomic era. His most famous and most enduring work deve...
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The name of James Thurber is immediately recognized by the majority of Americans as the author of hundreds of humorous essays and the artist of innumerable cartoons featured in the New Yorker during t...
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Next to Mark Twain, James Thurber is the most critically acclaimed humorist in American literary history. Like Twain he first established his reputation as a journalist. By the time he died, he was re...
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Called "one of the world's greatest humorists" by Alistair Cooke in the Atlantic, James Thurber was one of the mainstays of the New Yorker magazine, where his short stories, essays, and numerous carto...
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